lobby,announcements

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Several important things to know...

     I am aware that some people are having serious connection problems with
the new Seattle MegaPOP POP, and I've come to the conclusion that MegaPOP will
never address some of these issues.

     To address this situation, I've signed up with another aggregator that
will give us access to MegaPOP, UUNET, and Ziplink (now owned by WorldNet)
dial-up ports.

     However, your account will only work on 56k or ISDN account will only work
on MegaPOP until we get it transferred into the new system.  The administrative
interface is different for the new system and we have to learn how to use it.
People who are having dial-up service problems will be the first to be moved.
Next, people with need for access in areas served by the new numbers, not by
MegaPOP.

     Some people may not wish to move, because they have static IP's or because
restrictions on the new system are problematic.  SMTP is restricted to their
SMTP server with spam filtering, limits of a maximum of 30 recipients, etc.
I am trying to convince them to allow at least connection to our SMTP server
but there are apparently contractual issues with UUNET.

     I am totally in the process of restructuring the host services to fix
ongoing stability problems and improve speed.  When all is said and done, user
file space will be on a stripped disk partition with 10,000 RPM drives.  This
includes user files, ftp directory, and mail files.  This will take the NFS
load off of eskimo, greatly simplify and reduce NFS (network file system)
interdependencies between the machines, and we'll be replacing platforms which
are unreliable under Linux with platforms that are reliable under that OS.

     The crash tonight was my fault.  In order to do this I've got to make a
lot of configuration changes, and unfortunately, sometimes I type randomly.
Sorry.